Ender’s Game Sequels Might Be Completely Original Stories, Assuming They Happen

While not one of 2013’s most offensive busts, Gavin Hood’s adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game was far from a success, only earning back only $88 million of its $110 million budget, which doesn’t even include the cost of Lionsgate and Summit’s fairly widespread marketing campaign. At this point, a sequel is anything but a certainty, but that never stops conjecture from rearing its head. Fans have wondered which of Card’s novels they might go with for another film, but producer Roberto Orci has thrown a potential wrench into those conversations by saying any sequels that get made may not be based on any of Card’s works, but rather might be new original stories.

Oh, Hollywood, it seem you only know how to become “original” when you’re already dealing with characters that have tons of stories written about them. (See: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.) Of course, Orci also said they may just flip the order of the novels around, or possibly cut and paste sections of different novels to a wall and throw darts at them to dictate the sequence of the next film’s events.

To begin with, it depends on which books’ rights Lionsgate/Summit owns. Card’s first sequel was set many years after the first, with Ender aged to 35, but he eventually wrote Ender in Exile, which took place not too long after the events of the first novel. It seems like the perfect place to go for a film in which you’d be able to keep your main actor, in this case 16-year-old Asa Butterfield. But Orci presents another option. He told CraveOnline:

Or it could be potentially original because in Speaker for the Dead you pick him up when he’s already a man. There might be an in between step if that happens…That’s why I think the rights that they worked out is it could either be one of the books or it could be original or a mix so that you can do what you need to do for a movie.

No mention is made of why they’d be leaving Card’s already established and beloved universe behind, but the unstated answer probably has something to do with the recurring controversy that arises anytime the author’s name is brought up within the context of same-sex marriage, of which he is not a fan, to say the very least. He’s actually in the middle of his First Formic Warsprequel trilogy, but we probably won’t ever see those getting the cinematic treatment.

Do you guys think the film deserves to develop its franchise without the words of Card guiding it? Let us know in the comments.

Comments

The book is amazing, and the movie was a fairly decent adaption that kept me entertained. But it was never going to be a hit. Adults that saw the trailer probably thought “Oh wow, a movie about a kid who saves the planet from aliens.” If they don’t have kids, they don’t see it. If they do, they take their kids to see it. Unfortunately, most the kids who did see it probably were not able to grasp the deeper meanings laced throughout the whole movie. The “hero” to them commits genocide at the end. How is the average kid going to cheer for the titular character then? Ender’s Game will be one of the few movies in my collection. But it was destined to not be a big hit.